The Evolution of Social Wasps Review

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(More customer reviews)In the Evolution of Social Wasps, Jim Hunt begins with wasps but ultimately casts his net much more broadly to social organisms (or at least social insects) in general. Hunt begins the book with chapters on the different groups of wasps and their life histories. These chapters are useful, rich and informed and are a wonderful mix of the kinds of lovely drawings and natural history one might have found in a book on wasps in the 1900s (and given the lack of both in most modern books-I offer the comparison as high praise) and modern theory. The book then covers the biology of individual wasps, the biology of colonies and then of populations. It occurred to me while reading these sections that while invaluable to anyone interested in social wasps or in sociality more generally, it would also be a useful book around which to frame an undergraduate class on behavioral ecology as a kind of case study of the ways in which knowing one organism allows one to arrive at deeper insights. Finally, throughout the book (and the thread develops early in the book-just as it seems to have developed early in Hunt's work), Hunt advances his theory for how wasps and more generally social insects evolved sociality. Hunt's theory is controversial, but at a time when there is no accepted explanation for why and how sociality evolved, so are most of the others. Time will tell, one hopes, which theory for the origin of sociality best fits with the data we have now or those we will have in the future. Regardless of the answer, Hunt's book will stand as a classic treatise on wasps and a classic example of how a scientist moves from observation to insight again and again and again.

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Social behavior occurs in some of the smallest animals as well as some the largest, and the transition from solitary life to sociality is an unsolved evolutionary mystery. In The Evolution of Social Wasps, James H. Hunt examines social behavior in a single lineage of insects, wasps of the family Vespidae.He presents empirical knowledge of social wasps from two approaches, one that focuses on phylogeny and life history and one that focuses on individual ontogeny, colony development, and population dynamics. He also provides an extensive summary of the existing literature while demonstrating how it can be clouded by theory.Hunt's fresh approach to the conflicting literature on sociality highlights how oft repeated models can become fixed in the thinking of the scientific community.Instead, Hunt presents a mechanistic scenario for the evolution of sociality in wasps that changes our perspective on kin selection, the paradigm that has dominated thinking about social evolution since the 1970s.This innovative new model integrates life history, nutrition, fitness and ecology in which social insect biologists will find a rich storehouse of ideas and information, and behavioral ecologists will find a bracing challenge to long accepted models. Engagingly written, bold, and provocative, The Evolution of Social Wasps marks a milestone in our understanding of one of lifes major evolutionary transitions - the origin of social behavior.

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